The Baptist pastor with bright blonde hair was popular among preteen boys in the small town of Commerce, a former resident remembers. Pastor Billy Bob Burge worked in Commerce around 12 years ago, says the man, who asked not to be named. His son’s friends who were involved in the…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s critics, it seems, are beginning to smell blood in the water. After a week that’s seen Dallas City Council members singled out by the mayor for having a meeting to discuss Brown’s performance with the city manager and Brown firing back at his critics during…
Full credit to The Dallas Morning News’ Robert Wilonsky for finding this video first, but boy, it sure is something. First Baptist Church of Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress, it turns out, was not content to give his blessing to the Donald Trump for president circus just once. Monday afternoon, according…
So. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro did come to Dallas City Hall yesterday on what I can only call a secret mission, and I will explain why I call it that in a minute. HUD never would tell me what he talked about, but the…
My first inkling that America’s lawn obsession might not be terribly healthy came around 1995. We’d just moved into a new house in Far North Dallas, and 10- or 11-year-old me decided that the next-door neighbor’s lawn — green and smooth as flawless as a golf-course fairway with manicured grass…
Correlation does not equal causation. We know that. But it’s certainly beginning to appear that whenever an SMU athletics program is on the verge of a national breakthrough, it’s also likely on the verge of NCAA sanctions. In the 1980s, the football team that achieved prominence built on the backs…
The fight started on the third floor right before fifth period, when the kids were still buzzing from lunch and hardest to manage. Jennifer Duggins, a Spanish teacher, was monitoring the hallway outside her classroom when a surge of students rushed passed her and disappeared around the corner into an…
There are two stories currently consuming Dallas City Hall. They’re related, but they aren’t the same. One is the growing frustration among multiple members of the Dallas City Council, Dallas’ police associations and some members of the police rank and file with police Chief David Brown. The other is the…
At the contentious townhall meetings between city of Dallas staffers who insist Dallas Executive Airport is going to expand and neighboring Oak Cliff residents who would rather it didn’t, one airplane in particular has drawn flak. “At previous meetings, everyone has brought up the yellow airplane that was so loud,”…
As odd as it may seem at first glance given Texas’ highly developed car culture, the Dallas-to-Houston corridor might be the best spot in the country for high-speed rail. The two cities are at the center of heavily populated and economically dynamic metropolitan areas. They are separated by 220 miles,…
Let’s fly up high and take a bird’s eye view of Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings’ philosophy of government. Apparently it’s not just OK but a real good thing for deliberations and even decisions about the public’s business to be taken out of the hands of public officials and given instead…
As of August 31, Dallas drivers have killed 31 pedestrians in 2015. That’s already more than 2014 (22) and almost double the number killed in 2013 (16). In 2015, at least one pedestrian has died in 13 of the city’s 14 City Council districts — only Sandy Greyson’s District 12…
Ignore it. Ignore (almost) everything that happened in the Cowboys 39-28 loss to the Falcons. Joseph Randle, the team’s newly minted starting running back, is not as good as he looked Sunday. He’s not going to score three touchdowns a game — he may not score six more this season…
As of late last week, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro was scheduled to visit Dallas City Hall tomorrow, Tuesday, September 29. But late last week neither HUD nor the Dallas mayor’s office would confirm or deny the visit. If the visit is still on, HUD…
Last Wednesday brought a dose of positive news for anyone concerned about Texas’ sky-high teen birth rate, which given that it costs the state an estimated $1.1 billion per year and puts Texas in the company of such bastions of progressive public-health policy as Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma, should be everyone. According…
For Democratic state Senator John Whitmire, it’s simple. “You pay now or you pay later,” he says. “If you don’t pay now, you may pay with your life later or you’ll have to beg someone not to shoot you in your garage when they’re a crack addict or a mental patient…
The tenure of ex-University of Texas Athletic Director Steve Patterson was a barely mitigated disaster. On the job less than two years, Patterson resigned under duress September 15. When he quit, Patterson still had about four years left on his contract, worth $1.4 million annually. He’s not going to get…
For the sake of the record and now that a Dallas County grand jury has dismissed felony coercion charges against Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs, let’s go back and look at the level of dishonesty and trickery in the instigation of the charges, in the police investigation and in…
The late-summer Sturm und Drang over high water rates made it to the Dallas City Council this week, where Dallas Water Utilities Director Jody Puckett explained that, calm down, you’re water meter’s fine, you probably don’t have a leak, you just probably forgot during the weird monsoons of spring and early…
In Dallas and other cities across the country, local transit agencies are proud to announce that their buses run on natural gas. Natural gas puts less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than diesel, so the switch to natural gas is supposed to be a positive step to slow global warming…
Women and children first, right? No? Women and children second? Forget about ‘em? Get the hell out of my way? Maybe somebody will tell me that special regard for women and children under extreme circumstances — lifeboats on the Titanic, that kind of thing — has eroded or at least…
For all his claims about being fiscally conservative, Ted Cruz sure isn’t acting like it in his wild-eyed quest to keep every single government penny away from Planned Parenthood. Cruz, along with a number of his farthest right compatriots in Congress, have made it very clear over the past month…
